Organizations offering products and or services are increasingly dependent upon the online dimension of their businesses. The internet is increasingly being used by consumers to shop online and to perform product or service pre-purchase research. It has been found that the online experience of a consumer with an organization is highly correlated with their online and offline purchases and future business in general with that organization. It also has been found that slower access speeds during online shopping is correlated with more abandoned online shopping carts, and fewer returning online shoppers. Value added functions such as streaming video and interactive help also suffer if access speeds are low. To maintain their market share and to keep pace with the competition, organizations rely on a low latency and robust online presence to advertise their products and or services, provide information to potential customers, provide support functions to existing customers, and to conduct business transactions.
In addition to the web content provided to consumers for the purpose of online shopping and providing information and support in respect of products, some organizations deliver purely digital products or services over the internet such as music, streaming videos, software, and movies. These market sectors are growing, and as the quality and size of deliverables grow so does the corresponding bandwidth and the potential that delivery of those deliverables will be impaired. Some purely digital products and services are time sensitive or real-time in nature requiring instant or very fast interaction between the customer and the service. Some of these time sensitive interactive services include online applications, and multiplayer gaming. Low bandwidth and high latency cause delays in sending and receiving data which reduces responsiveness of the service, creating frustration and destroying the experience of interactivity.
Internet service subscribers have access to the internet over an access connection provided by a network access provider (NAP). The quality of service and bandwidth are determined based on the level of service the subscriber and the network access provider have agreed to. Typically, subscribers pay a monthly charge which is primarily determined from the bandwidth and speed of access, in which higher bandwidth and speed of access demands a higher monthly fee.
Consumers which have not subscribed to an NAP for internet access may have latent internet access facilities in their residences which are capable of accessing the internet but are not engaged to do so. This situation will be increasingly common as consumers subscribe to services such as VoIP and IPTV, which bring broadband facilities (including modems and residential Gateways) into their homes for reasons other than internet access services.
Currently, an organization's ability to provide web services to a customer or potential customer who is an internet service subscriber is limited by the subscriber's access capabilities as agreed to between the subscriber and the NAP. If a subscriber has a bandwidth limited connection through the NAP then the subscriber's online experiences of online services in connection with the organization will also be limited. Organizations currently can ask users to ‘self characterize’ their access type to better match and adapt the delivery of content to the capability of the access link; for example providing the choice between viewing high bandwidth and low bandwidth websites, and providing the choice between high bandwidth and low bandwidth online services. They also may have had the option of using content delivery networks (CND) such as an edge delivery service (EDS) which speeds up delivery of content to end users by maintaining a copy of web content closer to the domain of the end user, reducing inter-domain internet bottlenecks. This option does not address the bottleneck in place due to the agreement between the NAP and the subscriber, and located in the access and aggregation network segments that physically connect the subscriber to the internet.